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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

This is not surprising of Apple. They've always been a walled garden, that's why I don't buy their products. I like to own products that give me full control as a user.

When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.

Now they have the app store; another unnecessary restriction. As a developer, it's nice to own an Android phone because I can just run whatever code I want on it and I don't need to buy any special licenses, hardware or proprietary SDKs to do that.

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The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer.

I understand where you're coming from, I do. But when it comes to a phone, I greatly prefer the standardized hardware/interface/OS over the free for all. I hate to use the "it just works" nonsense, but that is exactly what it does.

Working in the Enterprise, the iPhone is infinitely easier for us to troubleshoot, and manage. Because everyone is running the same thing.

> The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer.

This is a non-sequitur. Fragmentation of Android OS versions isn't caused by Android letting you use web apps.

I was responding to the first two lines of their comment. If they are going to divert that way, then I'm going to respond to it.

You're not making sense to me. u/jondubois dislikes the walled garden, which is the inability to run apps that don't go through Apple's app store (with the corresponding review and fees).

You respond to those two lines by saying that the walled garden prevents fragmentation.

It does not.

* If you were unable to run apps other than via the Google Play Store in Android phones, the OS versions would still be fragmented. App developers have nothing to do with that.

* If only Google manufactured and updated Android phones (hence no fragmentation), you would still be able to run whatever you wanted in the phone. "Walled garden" doesn't mean "closed source".

The walled garden absolutely prevents fragmentation.

Apple has on multiple occasions over the years removed apps from the stores that weren't updated to use the latest iOS SDK. This meant that since all apps are targeting the latest iOS there is little impediment to moving the entire platform forward.

Ah OK, I see that point now. But Android's fragmentation isn't due to the users being unwilling to update, to keeps their apps working. It's because it used to cost a lot to OEMs and carriers to port their drivers etc to the new versions.

The walled garden is not what prevents having multiple manufacturers of phones. Apple could easily tear down their walled garden and let users install whatever software they want on their own phones - and they'd still be the only one manufacturing iPhones.

Your argument seems to indicate that you just like iPhones better. Otherwise, I think you would have said "I'd prefer that our company either standardize on one model of Android phone or the iPhone." because both would have the same effect - things would be easier to troubleshoot and manage since everyone would be running the same thing.

Anyway, currently as an iPhone user I think Apple comes up massively short on basic features. For instance - on an $800 phone they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light! That's completely absurd to me. Some others: You can't have multiple users (and this is big for the Enterprise). You can't put app icons wherever you want, you have to stick them all together in one big pile on the screen. You can't see the time a text message came in until you perform a non-obvious gesture. You can't see anything useful in the call history list until you click an item. You can't even change the default browser!

It's no wonder to me why Enterprise customers don't standardize on the iPhone - they'd be giving up all control to Apple.

If there was a single manufacturer of Android phones, with the seamless ecosystem that Apple provides. I would absolutely consider their phones. Right now, it's a mess, and the reason Apple is the only alternative.

> they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light!

I do use an Android phone on a regular basis, and there it's useful, since it only pops up when important messages arrive (read: on-call stuff).

But my daily driver is an iPhone, and sorry - this would be an absolute mess with the amount of apps installed trying to notify me of things. It's virtually impossible to determine what notifications or messages are important. Is a waze notification that a friend will almost arrive important? Not really. Is a waze notification that I should leave in 10 minutes important since the traffic isn't optimal? Absolutely. Relying on such an indicator simply doesn't work the moment you have dozens and dozens of apps installed that all send you mostly mundane low priority messages, but from time to time want to tell you something you really want to know.

In my case, a light like that would be on all the time or off when you actually have a pretty important notification - which would mean you simply cannot rely on it. Notifications are already too complex, and at the same time too limited. Simplifying it into a colored light is just adding to that mess.

I just want to note that as a developer you can run any code you want on your iPhone through XCode for free. You just can't distribute it in the App Store without a license ($100 a year). You can distribute the code though, and users can compile and install it. This is how Kodi distributes on Apple platforms.

This is a newish change though, within the last couple of years.

Many entitlements still require you to buy a certificate from Apple. You cannot, for example, compile and run your own VPN software.

Buy? I've never seen anything to suggest that special entitlements from Apple (KEXT signing on Mac, Network Extension usage on iOS, etc.) requires any payment besides the $100/yr developer program fee

Network Extension doesn't require special entitlement anymore?

Not true.

You can run any code you want on your iPhone through XCode for free as long as you have a Mac, which is much more expensive than the app store license.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression you would then be required to reinstall each app every 7 days. In addition, I've read online claims that they limit you to something like 3 App IDs per week on a personal account.

Doesn't mean you have to reinstall all your apps every week?

It's especially ironic once you remember that iOS 1 didn't even have apps: Steve said everything would be done on websites that would give a native experience...

That's only because he didn't see the opportunity and the ux. Not because he cared about freedom.

Apple knew this wasn't true. They knew there was an public native SDK on the roadmap because web technologies didn't cut it.

The Stocks and Weather app were originally HTML/CSS/JS apps just like Dashboard widgets (note Steve Jobs actually describing these apps on stage as 'widgets'), but the performance just wasn't there so they got reimplented using native apis.

So how do you do playlists when you just drag files to folders? What if you wanted the same song in multiple playlists? How do you do smart playlist? All of this is not as popular now as it was during the iPods heyday but it was popular then.

iTunes' UI for creating playlists and letting me add and remove songs from the device by dragging and dropping the files could be perfectly compatible.

What is a M3U file

If you're creating a m3u file you aren't just copying files to the player.

I handle playlist creation on my computer, and clone my entire library onto my phone, my playlist files contain relative paths and its pretty seamless.

And you think that's easier than iTunes was in the heyday of the iPod?

Much easier, my music player handles the playlists. My file manager handles the upload.

iTunes is beyond irritating to use, I've not once fired it up and accomplished what I came to do without at least one google search.

>When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.

Because MTP is utter rubbish.

Really, people complain about iTunes? It's never failed me as slow as it is. Try using MTP...

The iPod mounted as a perfectly-functional Firewire disk, yet you still had to use iTunes to put music on it for it to be playable on the device. (It was filed away in obfuscated filenames...)

NO one said anything about MTP. Copying files > anything.

Copying files... how? Emulating a FAT32 disk? That sucks. exFAT? Patents. MTP? Sucks. So how?

Ethernet over USB, FTP/SCP/SMB?

What's wrong with emulating a FAT32 disk?

I mean, the expected workflow is: I hook up the device to the computer, it shows up as a storage medium in my system. I can move files between the device and my computer as if it was an external disk or USB drive.

Anything on top of that is designed to be annoying.

FAT32 is a terribly outdated filesystem and should just not be used today, period. The filesize and name restrictions are awful. Mrkrabo does have a point.

The question about FAT32 was honest; thanks for the explanation. The rest of the comment (presenting storage in a normal, non-surprising way) is separate, and still stands.

Yeah, that's what irks me the most about iOS. Their whole idea of "the filesystem is an outdated concept" just never worked out and they refuse to give up on it. The greatest lie is that your iPad Pro can replace a PC, but you can't easily copy files from and to a flash drive. In the meantime, my wife's Surface accepts USB hardware just fine and she doesn't have to rely on awkward workarounds to get things done.

USB sticks became popular more than a decade ago, and not once have I had one fail to copy or remove a file by dragging and dropping.

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